The Register

With over 2,000 banks in operation, a domain only they can use has potential to make life harder for fraudsters India's Reserve Bank last week announced a plan to use adopt dedicated second-level domains - bank.in and fin.in - in the hope it improves trust in the financial services sector....

PLUS: Spanish cops think they've bagged NATO hacker; HPE warns staff of data breach; Lazy Facebook phishing, and more! Infosec In Brief DeepSeek's iOS app is a security nightmare that you should delete ASAP, according to researchers at mobile app infosec platform vendor NowSecure....

PLUS: Japan shifts to pre-emptive cyber-defense; Thailand cuts cords connecting scam camps; China to launch 'moon hopper' in 2026; and more! Asia In Brief Huawei chair Liang Hua last week told a conference in China that the company expects to meet its revenue targets for 2024, meaning it earned around 860 billion ($118.25 billion) - 22 percent growth compared to its 2023 result....

Tesla's DIY ERP legend meets the messy reality of entrenched federal contracts Comment Tesla reportedly decided not to upgrade its SAP's enterprise software a decade ago, opting to build its own system instead. Now, with Elon Musk heading up the Trump-blessed US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his cost-cutting mindset could have major implications for federal IT spending - and the big tech vendors cashing in on government contracts....

Oh look, a mini Stargate, how quaint The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France this week announced plans for a one-gigawatt AI datacenter campus dedicated to advancing development of artificial intelligence....

Vladimir Putin opens airlock after just three years Roscosmos boss Yury Borisov has been fired from the Russian space agency by executive order of the country's president, Vladimir Putin....

And US government adverts at that, say senators Updated US Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday sent letters to the CEOs of Amazon and Google asking why their ad businesses fund websites hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and allow government ads to appear on sites with illegal imagery....

Funding freeze while Feds review priorities If you were hoping the Biden administration's $5 billion investment in building a cross-country network of EV chargers would soon have you road-tripping in an electric car without range anxiety, think again: The Trump-led US Dept of Transport has put the plan under review and halted new funding....

Open source project chief hits out at 'social media brigading' Weighing in on yet another Linux kernel spat - this time over Rust device drivers - Linux supremo Linus Torvalds has shot the messenger....

Spacecraft weather solar storms, but ground processing laid low by water They can put a man on the Moon - but back on Earth, a busted water pipe managed to knock out NASA's solar mission data for months....

Blighty's latest stab at encryption? A secret order to pry open iCloud, sources claim The UK's Home Office refuses to either confirm or deny reports that it recently ordered Apple to create a backdoor allowing the government to access any user's cloud data....

Some of that cash is reportedly headed for $500B Stargate dream The AI investment landscape is shifting once again, with SoftBank reportedly finalizing a $40 billion stake in OpenAI - pushing its valuation to around $300 billion....

Shocking research warns electricity shortages could create construction bottleneck AI's thirst for electricity will see datacenter energy use more than double by the end of the decade - just five years from now - according to the latest forecast from investment banker Goldman Sachs....

It's not auto-enrollment. It's just your current plan with extra Copilot for more money. Completely different Users are now receiving notifications regarding their Microsoft 365 subscriptions and must take action if they wish to avoid Copilot and its extra charges....

But 'original sin' has already been committed, shrugs industry Governments are allowing AI developers to steal content - both creative and journalistic - for fear of upsetting the tech sector and damaging investment, a UK Parliamentary committee heard this week....

Freshly minted organization aims to take the guesswork out of incident severity for insurers and policy holders A world-first organization assembled to categorize the severity of cybersecurity incidents is up and running in the UK following a year-long incubation period....

248-year-old democracy is not a tech startup Opinion 120-hour work weeks, firing government staffers and dismantling agencies? Oh my. The US government under pseudo President Musk is in for a world of radical change....

Shabby admin invented 'transparent tape' - a terrible storage medium but a magic tool for unlocking IT budgets On Call Each week at work creates memories many are happy to forget, but some are willing to share with fellow Register readers in On Call, our Friday column that tells your tales of tech support....

Makers of content blockers, privacy add-ons say promises weren't kept Google's overhaul of Chrome's extension architecture continues to pose problems for developers of ad blockers, content filters, and privacy tools....

Reverses life extensions for some servers it now feels aren't useful in the inferencing age Amazon Web Services is struggling to get the high-quality servers it needs to build AI infrastructure and has retired other hardware early to make room to accelerated machines....

OCR plugin great for extracting crypto-wallet secrets from galleries Kaspersky eggheads say they've spotted the first app containing hidden optical character recognition spyware in Apple's App Store. Cunningly, the software nasty is designed to steal cryptocurrency....

35% drop in payments across the year as your backups got better and law enforcement made a difference Ransomware extortion payments fell in 2024, according to blockchain analyst biz Chainalysis this week....

We did Nazi see that coming Marko Elez, a former SpaceX, Starlink, and X engineer who was granted deep access to a critical US Treasury payment system by the Trump-blessed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has quit that team after he was linked to a racist Twitter account....

Looking forward to someone putting the new into nuclear Months after Amazon joined a half-billion-dollar funding round for next-gen modular nuclear startup X-energy, the biz has announced a supplemental Series C-1 raise - despite its fission reactor design remaining unproven....

Fourth time's the harm? Gravy Analytics has been sued yet again for allegedly failing to safeguard its vast stores of personal data, which are now feared stolen. And by personal data we mean information including the locations of tens of millions of smartphones, coordinates of which were ultimately harvested from installed apps....

Lawsuit: 'Scale of intrusion into individuals' privacy is massive and unprecedented' Updated Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has had its access to US Treasury payment systems restricted - at least temporarily - following a lawsuit from advocacy groups and unions....

Are cybersecurity roles included? Are Elon's enforcers vetted? Inquiring minds want to know Updated Elected officials are demanding answers as to whether the Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are hamstringing US national security....

Proof of concept projects stuck in pilot phase as investors get itchy feet Many business leaders remain unconvinced that AI is worth the expense despite continued hype from an industry that has bet billions on developing the tech and desperately needs to recoup that spending....

For those for whom a runny white or a hard yolk is just not good un uf Researchers have put computational fluid dynamics software to good use in devising a solution to the age-old problem of the perfect soft-boiled egg....

20 years? More like five for real-world workloads says company's Quantum AI lead Despite ongoing breakthroughs, quantum computing has struggled to shake the perception that it's always another ten years away from being practical. However, researchers at Google now argue the tech is actually much closer to commercial viability than some would have you believe....

Concerns around unfixed problems remain after system resulted in harm to some 150 patients The US Department of Veterans Affairs has restarted a project to implement Oracle electronic health records in its hospitals after the project was suspended in 2023....

Preview arrives in Canary Channel, release planned for Windows 10 and 11 Microsoft has released its first in-box public preview of Windows MIDI Services with full support for the MIDI 2.0 standard....

Fleets built to handle peak demand will lose money, leaving humans driving to the rescue Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is warning that it's not yet possible to commercialize autonomous vehicles due to high costs, seasonal demand fluctuations, and the need to prove "superhuman" safety....

57% higher price point and app compatibility issues aren't helping There remains little love for notebooks containing AI-capable processors and even less for Microsoft's Copilot+ models, with premium pricing, software compatibility, and opaque benefits cited as the reasons....

Lennart Poettering gave packed-out keynote talk. Jack Dorsey ... didn't FOSDEM 2025 FOSDEM returned to Brussels for the first weekend in February - not without some controversial people....

'Fetch' just got a lot more interesting You can teach a robotic dog new tricks, it seems, with mechanic canines now being deployed in tests to detect and defuse bomb threats....

Download speeds of 41.9 Gbps and upload speeds of 20.6 Gbps achieved, claims BT division Network builder and maintainer Openreach says it has tested a 50 Gbps fiber broadband connection in the UK, as a first step towards making it commercially available at some point in the distant future....

Individual publishers could be held liable for visitors' off-topic posts, legal eagle argues Analysis Individuals who run their own website could be held liable for, weirdly enough, off-topic visitor-posted comments that break the UK's Online Safety Act....

Somewhat stale range of Muskmobiles, competition from China, Elon being Elon, or all of the above? Registration of new Tesla cars slumped across Europe in January, as Chinese electric-vehicle makers racked up enormous growth....

The British are coming, the British are coming ... to terms with their loss Arm has given up on terminating one of its key licenses with Qualcomm, leaving the latter free to continue producing homegrown Arm-compatible chips for PCs, phones, and servers....

Are you trying to make this easy for China and Russia? Who bought it, who installed it, and what's happening with the data on it....

Don't laugh: The $4.5m fine proposed for carrier Telnyx shows how the Trump administration will run its comms regulator In its first enforcement action of the Trump presidency, the FCC has voted to propose fining Telnyx $4,492,500 - after scammers pretending to be the watchdog's staff started calling actual FCC staffers via the VoIP telco....

Some worry multiple languages will make it harder to maintain this open source uber-project, others disagree Developers trying to add Rust code to the Linux kernel continue to face opposition from kernel maintainers who believe using multiple languages is an unwelcome and risky complication....

One gives root access, the other lets you steal info and reconfig nodes, in the right (or should that be wrong) circumstances Cisco has fixed two critical vulnerabilities in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root or access sensitive information, modify configurations, and reload affected devices....

Here's hoping freeze-dried Polish dumplings are just as good as ones freshly fried in butter When Axiom Space's fourth mission to the International Space Station arrives in orbit this spring it'll include Poland's second-ever astronaut, who will bring an essential comfort from home: Pierogi....

CEO of Cloud Software a 'special government employee' probing for Team Elon The US Treasury has revealed Tom Krause - the chief exec of Citrix and Netscaler owner Cloud Software Group - has "read-only" access to a vital federal government payment system that disburses trillions of dollars annually....

Fall in line with executive policy or you're gone, acting OPM chief insists Chief Information Officers across the US federal government face increased job uncertainty as the Trump administration recommends agencies reclassify these positions, potentially making them political appointees....

Bezos' rocketeers tout capability as useful for NASA and other tech providers Blue Origin has sent its reusable New Shepard rocket on another suborbital lob, this time simulating lunar gravity for capsule payloads....

International security squads all focus on stopping baddies busting in through routers, IoT kit etc Netgear is advising customers to upgrade their firmware after it patched two critical vulnerabilities affecting multiple routers....

It looks like you want to irritate Windows users. Do you want some help with that? There are some things that can't be unseen, including Microsoft posting a hand-drawn image of the company's infamous assistant, Clippy, on social media....